Sparkblog

We recently held a hackathon at Sparkgeo where we split into a couple teams and turned an idea we had been toying with, but never actually had the time to implement, into a working product. Joe Burkinshaw, Parmvir Thind, and myself were team MVT-MVP aka Map-Zuckerberg.

This article shows how you (yes, you!) can build your very own US Census Tracts PostGIS database. I had looked over the interwebs for some time under the false assumption that someone, somewhere would have already done this, but it seems not. So this article documents my process. I am running a mac, so some things could be done faster / smarter using other technology refinements, but I have tried to keep things pretty generic for 'nix users. Windows people; you will find this process is pretty simple, I am sure you can replicate it using what you have available.

A very quick tip for those scratching their heads over trying to import a 3D shapefile (which doesn't actually have any 3D data, or at least none you care about) into a flat (2D) PostGIS data set and you keep getting a geometry constratint error.

OGR2OGR is a hugely useful GIS utility. Today I was using it to copy data between an Amazon Web Services (AWS) based PostGIS database and a local PostGIS database. This is a slightly weird use case, but I wanted to pull down some data locally for editing via Quantum GIS (QGIS).